Laura Ball
Laura's work is a psychoanalytical/environmental project that digs into the collective unconscious using endangered species.
MessageLaura Ball, Artist Bio, March 2023
Laura Ball’s work combines her technical achievements in watercolor with an ongoing part-psychoanalytical, part-environmental project she has explored for over fifteen years. She takes the kernel of the origin myth, as explained by Joseph Campbell, and digs into the subconscious, inspired by Jung. Starting with the collective unconscious of shared dreams, archetypes and memories, she makes work that will speak to the viewer in a deeply familiar arena. This is important to ignite the desire to protect the endangered creatures and the diminishing biodiversity on our planet. We share this place with them, we don’t own it, or them. We have long neglected our “custodial” duties. These watercolors that weave a tangle of threatened animals and plants have been included in shows in the US and internationally. Her work is in important public and private collections, including the Denver Art Museum, LACMA, the Cleveland Clinic and JP Morgan Chase. She received her MFA in 2004 from the University of California, Berkeley, and currently lives and works in San Diego, CA.
Statement
The deep well of shared knowledge, the collective unconscious, is a familiar and ancient source that we all draw imagery from. It comes to us in mythic tales and Hero’s journeys, primordial origin stories and archetypal dream worlds. At this depth the artist’s creative energy taps in to cosmogonies and the realm of the spirit to weave deeply significant images. These new watercolors represent access points and maps to these primeval places we all have in common, a familiarity outside of logical explanation, as if connected to the mycelium of the universe. The pieces in "Cosmos" lead you in to the labyrinth and provide a golden thread to follow. As the Egyptians made maps of the underworld, these pieces are maps of gates and portals to the glowing inner spirit. Follow this thread to the subconscious, non-verbal places, the antipodes of our daily existence.
“Like the earth of a hundred years ago, our mind still has its darkest Africas, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian Basins.” 1 These dark and fecund spaces, where creativity simmers with potential, illuminate a cosmic expanse populated by unlikely, preternatural creatures. The creative spark sets off an outpouring of tumbling, weaving plants, animals and parts that populate an interconnected cosmos, spilling out from the place of shared knowledge and empathy, from a deep core of coexistence that we have neglected. To reconnect with the greater energetic ecosystem of our natural world we only need find the entrance to the labyrinth; here, I offer you the thread that might lead you inside.
- Aldous Huxley, “Heaven and Hell”, 1955
Laura Ball, March 2023
All work Copyright 2015 - 2023 Laura Ball
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